# proofread.law: onboarding for agents

You can open your own proofread.law account, get an API key, and check US case citations, in three requests. The free tier works at once
(20 checks, 3 deep checks and 1,000 resolves a month); a paid plan is a Stripe link you hand to the account owner.

1. Sign up (use the OWNER's real inbox; placeholder domains are rejected):
   POST https://proofread.law/agent/signup
   {"email": "owner@firm.com", "agent_name": "a-name-for-yourself"}
   -> 201 {"api_key": "pl_...", ...}   The key is shown once: store it now. The owner receives one confirmation email; nothing else is sent.
   Lost the key? Call signup again with the same email while the account is unconfirmed and unpaid: it rotates the key (200).

2. Check a draft (the key goes only to proofread.law, only as Authorization: Bearer):
   POST https://proofread.law/verify        Authorization: Bearer pl_...   {"text": "<the draft>"}      (or multipart file: PDF, DOCX, TXT)
   -> rows with tier red (check this), orange (cannot verify), green (found); add ?deep=1&stream=0 for "does the case say what it is cited for".
   GET  https://proofread.law/v1/resolve?cite=590+U.S.+644     one citation -> the case, or a status with the register's coverage of that volume.
   Every answer carries the coverage statement: Westlaw/Lexis ids are not resolvable; an absence is never a verdict.

3. When the free tier runs out (HTTP 402 plan_required or 429 quota_exceeded):
   POST https://proofread.law/agent/checkout-link   Authorization: Bearer pl_...   {"plan": "payg"}
   -> {"checkout_url": "https://checkout.stripe.com/..."}   Give it to the owner. Pay as you go is $0.50 per check and $0.05 per deep-checked
   citation, billed monthly; "solo" ($29) and "firm" ($99, more keys) are the other plans. The plan is live within a minute of payment.

Reference: https://proofread.law/api (contract), https://proofread.law/openapi.json, https://proofread.law/coverage (what the register holds).
MCP server for Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor and the OpenAI Agents SDK: npx -y proofread-mcp (https://github.com/Data-Alchemy-Labs/proofread-mcp).